Some do

1
Some dos and donts from my PhD

• Antoon Goderis
• Information Management Group
• CS700
• 20 October 2006
• goderisa_at_cs.man.ac.uk

2
Me

• Belgian
• First degree economics (Leuven)
• Conversion course in CS and AI (Mcr / Edin)
• Ex-Mentor
• PhD in the Information Management Group
• Carole Goble and Robert Stevens
• eScience Bioinformatics
• Workflow

3
Reasons I did a PhD

• Some v cool people
• Develop and work with latest techniques
• If it doesnt work out, the job market will still
  be there

.. in Manchester

• Home of ontologies meeting the real world
• Proximity to the academics
• English

4
Dos
5
Find your own niche

• Find and Do Your Own (Little but Great) Thing
• Zigzagging between theory and practice
• Its hard to please two masters
• In a little over three (four) years
• So choose, at the latest after year one

6
Add to Knowledge

• You already have a lot of baggage to draw on
• Lots of small steps so keep going
• Who could be your community/communities?

Community (or reviewers) knowledge about
whatever
t1
t2
7
Talk to all who will listen ?

• Carole Goble
• Ulrike Sattler
• Chris Wroe
• Phil Lord
• Robert Stevens
• Mark Greenwood
• Dave Robertson
• Bertram Ludaescher
• Andy Brass
• Norman Paton
• Alan Bundy
• Austin Tate
• Nikiforos Karamanis
• Peter Li
• Alan Rector
• Serafeim Zanikolas
• Andreas Wombacher
• Evgeny Zolin
• Richard Banach

• Ilkay Altintas
• Efrat Jaeger
• Christopher Brooks
• Edward Lee
• Stephen Potter
• Jun Zhao
• Pinar Alper
• Duncan Hull
• Paul Fisher
• Matt Horridge
• Khalid Belhajjame
• Boris Motik
• Birte Glimm
• Frank van Harmelen
• Annette ten Teije
• Marco Roos
• Armin Haller
• Jim Blythe
• Daniele Turi

8
And find your own truth

• Brokering problem-solving methods
• Agent-based protocol composition
• Process algebra and description logics hybrid
• Ontology instance learning
• Abduction based ontology retrieval
• Workflow interoperability
• Simple versus complex and their combination
• Gold standard based workflow discovery

9
Time management

• E-mail/phone/instant-chat/meetings
• Read related work
• Attend courses/seminars/workshops/conferences
• Demonstrate
• Review
• Work dinners
• Adapt to a life abroad
• Do your own research..

10
Care for your supervisor

• Find a topic you both care for
• All feedback is good feedback
• Time is short
• Prep for the outside
• Meetings
• Set the agenda
• Solutions, not problems
• Writings
• Print stuff out
• Get more than one opinion

11
Travel

• Conferences
• Galway, Chicago
• Workshops
• Edinburgh, Bath, London, Hinxton, Galway, San
  Diego
• Study visits
• Innsbruck, Berkeley, San Diego

12
Anticipate going up and down
13
Have a life

• Life outside research helps life inside
• Dare to (actively) do nothing

14
Donts
15
Its not about

• Being formal versus practical
• Being in a sexy domain
• Being a coder
• Being overly respectful
• Pushing out paper
• Doing your time

16
Beware procrastination
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Beware procrastination

• Nobody cares
• whether you show up
• whether you do work while you are in
• when you leave
• But there is a catch ?
• Output is measured through
• Papers in good places
• Impact in the community

18
Finally, a good routine (for me)

• Write in order to think
• Not think in order to write
• Log your (excitement/disillusion with-) ideas
• Make it a compelling story
• Draw up a timeline with respect to a paper
  deadline
• Prioritise/plan every morning
• Keep at least one day per week free of work
  (-thoughts)
• Have a periodic reality check of your ideas
• Avoid analysis paralysis balance thinking/doing

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The end

• Thanks
• Questions?
• goderisa_at_cs.man.ac.uk